The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain

A Spiritual Life

Ralph McInerny

Publication Year: 2011

The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain is distinguished philosopher Ralph McInerny’s hymn of praise to the spiritual and intellectual life of the great Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (1881–1973). The structure of this work is modeled on the medieval book of hours, making use of the daily offices, from Matins through Compline, to examine each stage of the life of Maritain and his wife, Raïssa. Through this unique blending of biography and meditation, McInerny creates a powerful portrait of the Maritains, one that reveals a model of the intellectual life as lived by Christian believers. McInerny’s authoritative work provides an interesting and accessible avenue of entry to Maritain’s life and thought. Among the topics McInerny covers are Maritain’s remarkable and diverse set of friends, his involvement in French politics, and the development of his views on the nature and future of democracy, the church, and Catholic intellectual life. By skillfully interweaving Maritain’s philosophy with anecdotes from his life, McInerny demonstrates what distinguished Maritain as a Catholic philosopher and why he is a source of inspiration for McInerny and others of his generation.

CONTENTS

INVITATORY

Four Germans who were in Paris for a meeting devoted to phenomenology
visited the Maritain home in Meudon on September 14, 1932. Jacques Mari -
tain had opened the conference and, at the age of fifty, was already enjoying
a global reputation as a...

MATINS (1881-1906)

BEFORE RAÏSSA

Jacques Maritain tells us so little of his antecedents and boyhood that one
is tempted to agree with his biographer Barré that the philosopher made
a concerted effort to cut himself loose from his roots, choosing to be an
exile in his native land and elsewhere.1...

RAÏSSA

When the Maritains were in exile in New York during World War II,
Raïssa published two volumes of memoirs. The first, written in 1940, was an
almost desperate effort to recall better days before the fall of France and to
conjure from memory the presence of old...

CONVERSION

The lectures of Henri Bergson had lifted the cloud of despair from Jacques
Maritain and Raïssa Oumansov—she wrote, “I was rediscovering the
lightheartedness and joy of my childhood, of those days when, with beating
heart, I went to the lycée.” They were...

LAUDS (1906-1918)

SPIRITUAL DIRECTIONS

In 1905, Jacques Maritain passed his agrégation en philosophie, and was thus qualified
to teach in a lycée. The following year was the decisive one of their
conversion. Then, thanks to a fellowship he had received, still not having informed
their parents of their...

VERSAILLES

As the academic year 1908 drew to a close, Raïssa was in bed for a month
with a sore throat—Jacques himself had diptheria—and when they left
Germany they lived for several months with Raïssa’s parents. After that,
there was a month on the Normandy..

THE VILLARD BEQUEST

On April 18, 1917, Jacques Maritain received a letter from a soldier who
had once taken his course on German philosophy at the Institut Catholique,
one Pierre Villard. It seems possible that Maritain had little if any
memory of the man who, in a lengthy...

ACTION FRANÇAISE

Jacques Maritain’s long involvement with Action Française, the movement
run by Charles Maurras, gave him and his wife and many others
great difficulty to explain. Indeed, the tendency, first present in Raïssa’s
memoirs, is to portray his association...

PRIME (1918-1923)

LES CERCLES D’ÉTUDES THOMISTES

Of the two things Maritain said the Villard bequest would enable him
to do—continue his philosophical work and conduct a center of spiritu -
ality—the second was begun at Meudon in a house the Maritains were able
to buy with their new and unexpected...

VAE MIHI SI NON THOMISTIZAVERO

The foregoing chapter should make clear that when Maritain amends the
cry of Saint Paul, “Woe is me if I do not preach the gospel,” into the slogan
that provides the title of this section, he is not putting Scripture to secular
use. The study of Thomas, the...

TIERCE (1923-1926)

MARITAIN’S KULTURKAMPF

Jacques’s most active involvement in Action Française was from 1920
through 1926, thanks to his connection with La Revue Universelle. Jointly financed by Maurras and Maritain from money they had each received from
the fallen Villard, it was meant to convey...

ART AND SCHOLASTICISM

Although Maritain had been given leave to write two introductory manuals
of philosophy5—a task that might have recalled his hack work of 1908—
it was the little book in which he sought to expand the scholastic conception
of art and apply it to fine art...

CONTESTING THE HEGEMONY OF GIDE

It was in 1920 that Maritain became the cofinancier as well as collaborator
in La Revue Universelle. While Action Française origins of the review are incontestable, equally incontestable is the fact that increasingly Maritain saw
his social role as a Thomist...

SEXT (1927-1940)

PRIMACY OF THE SPIRITUAL

The 1930s represent a golden period of Jacques Maritain’s life as a Christian
philosopher. During this decade he produced his masterpiece The Degrees of
Knowledge and a host of other works of greater or lesser importance, but all
testifying to the magisterial role he now played for so many. His guidance
was not confined...

CONTROVERSY OVER CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY

Questions as to the relationship between the mind’s quest for understanding,
on the one hand, and religious faith, on the other, are as old as Christianity.
Has faith overcome the need for philosophy? Is there a necessary
enmity between faith and reason? In...

DEGREES OF KNOWLEDGE

In 1928, Jacques switched from the chair in modern philosophy to that
in logic and cosmology at the Institut Catholique. Toward the end of the
following year, in October, he went on leave of absence to write the book
that is his acknowledged...

GILSON AND MARITAIN

Almost before Maritain and Etienne Gilson met, the two men were linked
together as if they were two barrels of the shotgun that would scatter the
confusions of the contemporary world with Thomistic pellets. One is reminded
of the twinning of Hilaire...

SECOND THOUGHTS ON A FIRST BOOK

“Read Bergson. I have criticized him a lot, but read Bergson!” Thus Jacques
Maritain spoke to Yves Floucat in 1960. Misgivings about the severity of his
criticisms of Henri Bergson in his first published book, The Bergsonian Philosophy, were already expressed...

DISPUTE WITH CLAUDEL

Among the old friends and admirers who were put off by Maritain’s po -
litical activities during the thirties was Paul Claudel, poet, diplomat, dramatist.
In a moving account, Ma conversion,37 Claudel...

NONES (1940-1948)

EXILE IN NEW YORK

“I left France in January 1940 to give the courses which for several years I
had been offering at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in To -
ronto and for a series of lectures in the United States. I planned to return to
Paris at the end of June, but the tragic events...

THE HEART OF THE MATTER

The increased tempo of Maritain’s life as he settled into wartime exile in
New York—the writing, lecturing, teaching, consultation with represen -
tatives of General de Gaulle, radio broadcasts—did not distract Jacques and
his little flock from the one thing needful. His reflections...

ADVENTURES IN GRACE

And Raïssa? How could she possibly adjust to being transplanted to the
New World, a stranger among strangers, after having established a modus
vivendi at Meudon that enabled her to pursue in relative solitude the life
of prayer? “Raïssa had lost the one place—Meudon, with...

AMBASSADOR TO THE VATICAN

Jacques and his wife and sister-in-law spent some summer weeks of 1944 at
East Hampton. Raïssa responded with uncharacteristic exuberance. “This
landscape is delicious, the light extraordinary; trees, bushes, everything
seems marvelous to me. It is the first time...

VESPERS (1948-1960)

MAN AND THE STATE

The next twelve years would be triumphant ones for Jacques Maritain, not
quite proving the adage about prophets and their own country—in France
a memorial volume of the Revue Thomiste would be dedicated to his work, and
his achievement would be celebrated at a conference...

CREATIVE INTUITION

From the beginning of the meetings at Meudon, the Cercles d’études thomistes
had included artists and writers and poets as well as philosophers. But then,
Maritain’s understanding of the role of Thomas by no means restricted it
to the saint’s influence on philosophers...

THE INTUITION OF BEING

The goal of the philosopher is wisdom, and wisdom consists in knowing,
understanding things in terms of their ultimate causes. There are many explanations
of events, proximate, middle distant, remote; but ultimately the
cause that explains everything is God...

MORAL PHILOSOPHY

Jacques Maritain had never been the kind of philosopher who settles into
a single area and becomes expert at that, all but ignoring the other domains
of philosophy. From the outset, his writings exhibit an incredible range
and it becomes clear that he regards the full scope of philosophy as his responsibility.
So he had written...

LITURGY AND CONTEMPLATION

The couple who had written De la vie d’oraison thirty-five years before wrote
a complementary little work a year or so before the death of Raïssa on
the subject of the liturgy. Written for the American review Spiritual Life, it
was composed in French and appeared...

COMPLINE (1960-1973)

THE JOURNALS

It was after his heart attack that Jacques formed the idea of writing his
memoirs. This work was interrupted by the illnesses of the three, and Carnet
de notes was not published until 1965. The opening chapters were written in
1954 and the rest later. In an...

PEASANT OF THE GARONNE

When Pope John XXIII announced that he was convening an ecumenical
council he surprised everyone. Historically, councils have disruptive effects,
largely because they are called to settle some crisis in the Church and state
their judgments in terms of anathema...

LITTLE BROTHER OF JESUS

Returned to France, feeble, valetudinarian, yet still with years of life ahead
of him, Maritain had the great good fortune of being offered a home with
the Little Brothers of Jesus in Toulouse. He could share in the life of the
community, teach, prepare for eternity...

NUNC DIMITTIS

He was raised in a broken home, his mother a natural child who became
one of France’s first divorcées and reassumed her maiden name. His father
had been his grandfather’s secretary, was a wastrel, and ended a suicide. As a
boy he was radicalized by a socialist...

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